August 26, 2000
CONTENTS:
- The Mainland's Environment and the Protection of China's Cultural Heritage: A Chinese Cultural Heritage Lawyer's Perspective
- City's bronze goddess stolen
- The Art Newspaper (http://www.theartnewspaper.com) : This week's top stories
- Stolen and Looted Art and Antiquities (http://dir.yahoo.com/Arts/Art_History/Stolen_and_Looted_Art_and_Antiquities/ )
- A PLUNDERED PAST (Two years ago, archaeologists at Zeugma discovered a mosaic fragment preserving only part of a woman's portrait, nicknamed "Zeugma's Mona Lisa" or the "Gypsy Girl." Plunderers had previously looted the surrounding mosaics.)
- MYSTERY OF THE MAYA FACADE (Astute detective work gives new meaning to a looted artwork)
- re: IF IT IS LEGAL, IT IS NOT ALWAYS ETHICAL
The Mainland's Environment and the Protection of China's Cultural Heritage:
A Chinese Cultural Heritage Lawyer's Perspective
(This paper was published on ART ANTIQUITY AND LAW, Vol. 5, Issue 1, March 2000. We thank the Institute of Art and Law for its generous permission to recreat it on the web site of Cultural Heritage Watch. We also thank Dr Ruth Redmond-Cooper, the executive editor of ART ANTIQUITY AND LAW, for her hard work on the paper.)
The author of this paper believes that China's cultural heritage forms part of a world-wide heritage and, as such, is as important as the heritage of other countries. Understanding the climate surrounding the protection of China's cultural heritage is the foundation for successful international cooperation. The issue of illegal excavations demonstrates this situation in detail.
The view of the cultural heritage lawyer is different from that of the archaeologist. Although China is a member of the relevant international conventions, including UNESCO and UNIDROIT, its legislation falls far short of the international standard. The relevant professionals and agencies do a lot but there are significant weaknesses. The attitude of local people is the most important factor when considering the preservation of China's cultural heritage in the future, and to this end the public needs to be educated. The author thinks that the establishment of independent non-government organisations in China is crucial to ensure success in the future.
read full text at:
http://www.culturalheritagewatch.org/social-environment-of-protection.htm
City's bronze goddess stolen
A BRONZE statue of a Greek goddess, estimated to be worth up to £50,000, has been stolen from a traffic island in central Birmingham where it has stood since 1968. The statue of Hebe, the mythical wife of Hercules, was modelled by the sculptor R J Thomas on a young London dancer, Katterina Williams, and stood at Holloway Head near the city's inner ring road. Graham Allen, Birmingham's assistant director of museums and arts, said: "Hebe is part of the city's heritage and we want her back."
From: newsletter@theartnewspaper.com
Date sent: Fri, 25 Aug 00 13:42:53 W. Europe Daylight Time
To: "info@artcrime.ws"info@artcrime.ws
Subject: NORTH KOREA DEMANDS COMPENSATION FROM JAPAN
The Art Newspaper.com
http://www.theartnewspaper.com
This week's top stories:
NORTH KOREA DEMANDS COMPENSATION FROM JAPAN
TOKYO. At the latest round of intergovernmental talks between Japan and North Korea, the North Korean delegation placed the issue of compensation from Japan for its 1910-45 colonial occupation of the Korean peninsula at the top of the agenda.
http://www.allemandi.com/TAN/news/article.asp?idart=2937
IF NOT VIENNA, THEN LOS ANGELES
NEW YORK. The heirs to the Bloch-Bauer family of Vienna have filed suit in Los Angeles to recover six paintings by Gustav Klimt that were seized by Austrian Nazis in 1939 and never returned. The paintings are now in the Austrian National Gallery in Vienna and are valued at some $150 million.
http://www.allemandi.com/TAN/news/article.asp?idart=2936
CHINESE ARTISTS MAY SUE VENICE BIENNALE
HONG KONG. In a bizarre twist of recent debates about the legal limits of appropriation, the Sichuan Academy of Fine Artùone of ChinaÆs three major art schoolsùsays it intends to sue curator Harald Szeeman, artist Cai Guo Qiang and the Venice Biennale itself for ôviolation of copyright.ö
http://www.allemandi.com/TAN/news/article.asp?idart=2934
YOUR WORD SHOULD BE YOUR BOND
NEW YORK. A preliminary court ruling in July denied the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) the $18.5 million in damages it sought against the estate of Madeline Haas Russell. The museum had filed a claim against the estate in April, charging failure to honour an oral agreement to allow SFMOMA to purchase PicassoÆs 1933 painting ôNu au fauteuil noirö from the estate.
http://www.allemandi.com/TAN/news/article.asp?idart=2933
DECISIVE TIMES FOR UNDERWATER ARCHAEOLOGY: WHO OWNS THE WATERY PAST?
LONDON. The last 3,000 years of human history are written at the bottom of the ocean. The record of our past that lies hidden in the undiscovered shipwrecks scattered around the world is an unparalleled archaeological resource waiting to be investigated. As the development of deep-sea exploration technology continues apace, an increasingly polarised debate about who has the right to claim ownership of submerged vessels and the booty they may contain, and how best to manage our underwater cultural heritage is taking shape.
http://www.allemandi.com/TAN/news/article.asp?idart=2931
From: Museum Security Network [mailto:securma@xs4all.nl]
Sent: Monday, August 14, 2000 11:21 PM
Subject: Stolen and Looted Art and Antiquities
http://dir.yahoo.com/Arts/Art_History/Stolen_and_Looted_Art_and_Antiquities/
http://www.archaeology.org/
A PLUNDERED PAST
Two years ago, archaeologists at Zeugma discovered a mosaic fragment preserving only part of a woman's portrait, nicknamed "Zeugma's Mona Lisa" or the "Gypsy Girl." Plunderers had previously looted the surrounding mosaics. (Özgen Acar)
Plundering of Zeugma's mosaics stretches back as far as the nineteenth century. One of the most important of these artworks is a panel depicting the sea god Poseidon surrounded by personifications of Roman provinces. This mosaic is currently on exhibition, in pieces, in St. Petersburg and Berlin. The terms used to describe the origins of mosaics to be found in various museum catalogues, such as "East Mediterranean," "near Syria," "said to be from East Turkey," or "possibly from South East Anatolia," may refer to Zeugma. An example would be the square-shaped marble and glass floor mosaic of geometric design in the North Carolina Museum of Art, in Raleigh, where it is referred to as "Roman, probably from East Turkey."
Since the 1970s, the museum at Gaziantep, the region's principal city, has received several warnings of smuggling activities and has conducted sporadic rescue excavations. On July 2, 1992, the museum was alerted to an illegal dig. Archaeologists from the museum found that a tunnel big enough for a person to pass through had been dug into a Roman villa. During their excavations, they found an extremely well preserved second-century A.D. mosaic depicting the wedding feast of Dionysos and Ariadne. The mosaic was left in place, but thieves had been alerted to its existence by local news reports. Six years later, in a nighttime raid, they cut out two-thirds of the mosaic and made off with it. Interpol has been searching for it since 1998.
In 1993, responding to a Turkish government request, agents from the New York FBI Art Theft Department confiscated from the Fortuna Gallery on Madison Avenue a marble statue of a young man and fragment of garland smuggled from Aphrodisias, in western Turkey. At the gallery they saw a piece of mosaic showing the centaur Nessos carrying off Heracles' wife Deianira. While Turkish archaeologists were examining a photograph of this mosaic, by coincidence, another photo of the piece was found in Nizip, a town near Zeugma, among the color negatives of a local photographer. In 1974, the owner of the Fortuna Gallery had been sentenced to two years in prison for antiquities smuggling in Turkey. The current location of this mosaic is unknown.
In September 1993, archaeologists found another tunnel left by looters. Excavations by David Kennedy of the University of Western Australia revealed a villa containing an 80-foot-square mosaic from which the heads of two seated figures, a man and a woman, had been cut out. Canadian scholar Sheila Campbell later established that mosaics of the lovers Parthenope and Metiochos in the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas, were the missing pieces of the mosaic Kennedy found. The matter came to the attention of the Turkish government and Bernard Davezac, director of the Menil Collection, and both mosaics were returned to the Gaziantep Museum this past June.
Archaeological Institute of America
http://www.archaeology.org/
http://www.archaeology.org/
MYSTERY OF THE MAYA FACADE
Astute detective work gives new meaning to a looted artwork.
BY DAVID FREIDEL
In 1968, New York antiquities dealer Everett Rassiga arranged a spectacular coup. Looters working in the jungle of Campeche in southeastern Mexico had notified their East Coast contact of the existence of a magnificent painted stucco facade decorated with the well-preserved face of a young Maya king wearing the distinctive flanged crown of royalty. According to the looters, the facade graced a temple or palace at a little-known site known as Placeres some 35 miles east of the Late Classic (A.D. 600-900) Maya metropolis of Calakmul. Flanking the king were images of old gods, each of whom held a carved Maya glyph in his left hand. The whole facade had been carefully buried, most likely during what Mayanists call a "termination ritual," a ceremonial "closing" of an important building. Rassiga arranged for the facade to be flown to New York for sale.
The facade entered the art market just as the Metropolitan Museum of Art was planning Before Cortés, a blockbuster exhibition of Precolumbian art. Rassiga approached the Met's director, Thomas P.F. Hoving, about acquiring the piece for the exhibition. Hoving turned it down, choosing instead to notify his counterpart, Ignacio Bernal, at the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. Rassiga owned a house in Cuernavaca, and, with the cooperation of Mexican authorities, Bernal made him an offer: give up his house or return the facade. The dealer chose the house, and the looted masterpiece of Early Classic (A.D. 250-600) Maya architectural art was flown to Mexico City, where it was restored and put on display in the museum's Maya hall.
The man who had been sent to oversee the clearing, cutting, and shipping of the facade to New York had taken a series of color photographs documenting the looting process, including images of the intact facade in situ. In the mid-1980s, I obtained copies of the photographs from a colleague who, as an expert in Mesoamerican art, had been shown the facade when it was for sale in New York. Though my colleague declined to purchase it, he was allowed to retain the photographs for study. My copies, which in time would provide critical information about the meaning of the facade--that it depicted an important meeting between two Maya kings--would languish in a file for more than a decade.
DAVID FREIDEL of Southern Methodist University co-authored Forest of Kings and Maya Cosmos with the late Linda Schele.
http://www.archaeology.org/
From: "wyxhsz" hsuzhong@public2.east.cn.net
To: securma@xs4all.nl
Subject: »Ø¸´: IF IT IS LEGAL, IT IS NOT ALWAYS ETHICAL
Date: Fri, 25 Aug 2000 15:45:52 +0800
Dear Ton,
Culturalheritagewatch is preparing many pictures of Chinese cultural property with unclear provenances, auctioned by both major auction houses. I suspect these items were illicitly excavated and illicitly trafficked.
At the moment Culturalheritagewatc is promoting a draft law on prohibiting both auction houses entering into mainland of China.
HE
http://www.culturalheritagewatch.org/
-----Original Message-----
·¢¼þÈË: Museum Security Network securma@xs4all.nl
ÊÕ¼þÈË: Museum Security Mailinglist securma@xs4all.nl ÈÕÆÚ: 2000Äê8ÔÂ23ÈÕ 20:52
Ö÷Ìâ: IF IT IS LEGAL, IT IS NOT ALWAYS ETHICAL
http://museum-security.org/
August 23, 2000
IF IT IS LEGAL, IT IS NOT ALWAYS ETHICAL
Part 4 of a thread about a possible Italy - Australia connection smuggling antiquities, plus some additional, and relevant cases and information.